Musei Capitolini in Rome are lending San Francisco one of their greatest treasures, the remarkable Baroque masterpiece The Medusa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), one of art history’s finest sculptors and a leading figure in Italian Baroque art and architecture. Recent conservation efforts have restored this sculptural triumph to its full glory and revealed previously hidden artistic techniques.
Believed to date from around 1638 to 1648, this extraordinary work takes its subject from classical mythology, as cited in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
In the Metamorphoses, Ovid narrates that Medusa, the most beautiful and deadly of the Gorgons, had the power to turn to stone anyone who dared gaze into her eyes.
By surprising her in her sleep, Perseus was able to cut off her head while looking at her reflection in the bronze shield given to him by Minerva.
The hero, after having freed Andromeda and triumphed in his quest to slay the dragon, thanks to the still intact petrifying power of Medusa, gave the head to Minerva. Minerva, the Roman Goddess of reason and knowledge, then used it to adorn her shield, as a terrifying weapon to defeat her enemies.
The image became popular in the Renaissance with famous paintings by Caravaggio and by Annibale Carracci in the frescoes painted between 1598 and 1601 in the Galleria of Palazzo Farnese.
Bernini's sculpture is considered a "true" portrait of Medusa, caught in a transitory moment of unique “metamorphosis." With a classically beautiful face and delicate features, she sees herself in an imaginary mirror and is caught in the moment when she realises the tragic trick of fate. Before our very eyes, her soft flesh changes colour, the writhing serpents in her hair paralyse her and her expression of pain and anguish is forever captured in marble.
It is more proof of Bernini's ability to capture the climax of a transitory action and the contradictory complexity of human emotions in in marble.
The Medusa will be displayed exclusively in the U.S. at the Legion of Honor in the museum’s Baroque gallery 6, where it can be seen in context with the Museums’ great collections of paintings and sculpture from the era of Bernini.
November 17, 2011 - February 19, 2012
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